A Leo X Cutting Rediscovered

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a post about a cutting from the same Pope Leo X manuscript as the two cuttings at Vassar College. At that time, I only knew of it from a photograph taken in 1993, and did not know its whereabouts.

A couple of months ago I recognised it in a box of leaves and cuttings that had just arrived at Christie's and had not yet been catalogued. It has now been put online here as part of their December "Online Only" sale.

We now have access to images of both the front and back, but the I have been unable to identify the text on the back.

High-resolution images (though rather pale; the images above have been adjusted) are on the Christie's website here (front) and here (back).

A Dismembered Prayerbook from the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson

Christie's recently held its first "Online Only" auction of medieval manuscript leaves and cuttings. I visited them while they were cataloguing for the sale, and was able to tell them that this fine miniature is by the Master of Jacques de Luxembourg:

Christie's [Source]

and that two other leaves from the same manuscript are in the Jean Miles Blackburn Collection at the Cleveland Museum of Art:

More Medieval Manuscripts in the Bier Archive

Among other complete manuscripts, leaves, and cuttings represented in the Bier Archive are the following:

[Source]

1902 Forrer Catalogue now available online

It seems that Google scanned Robert Forrer's Unedierte Federzeichnungen Miniaturen und Initialen des Mittelalters (Strassburg, 1902) at the end of December 2014. Even though it appears not to be available in the UK through Google (except as snippet views) it is available through Archive.org.

The Vassar Leo X Cuttings (Part III): The Parent Volume

Having demonstrated in a previous post that the Vassar (and related) cuttings come from a manuscript closely related to the Preparatio ad missam manuscript of Pope Leo X, now at the Morgan Library, we can now consider what else can be deduced about the appearance of the volume from which the cuttings came.

Part of the evidence comes from the text visible on the backs of the cuttings:

New Cuttings From a Missal of Leo X, Illuminated by Attavante c.1520 [Part I]

In preparation for a visit to manuscript repositories within a few hours drive of New York city, I contacted Vassar College Library's Special Collections. They have a online listing of their leaves and cuttings, which included this tantalizing description:

I enquired about this and other items, and was kindly sent images by Ronald D. Patkus, Head of Special Collections and Adjunct Associate Professor of History, and Dean Rogers, Special Collections Assistant. I was not at all prepared for what I received:

The Ferrell Roman de la Rose: a Budé, Bourré, and Pérussis Puzzle

After reading the blog post about a manuscript in Liège with the arms of Jean(?) Budé, Dominique Vanwijnsberghe kindly told me about a late 18th-century illuminated leaf, added to a late 14th-century manuscript in the Morgan Library, New York (MS G.32, of which there are images and a description online), which also has the Budé arms half-way down the right border.

Visiting me in London a few weeks later Dominique very kindly gave me a copy of his excellent book, “Moult bons et notables”: L’enluminure tournaisienne à l’époque de Robert Campin (1380–1430) (Leuven, 2007), in which the image below is fig.285.

New York, Morgan Library, MS G.32, fol.1r

Detail of right border

A Leaf from a Fine English Psalter, c.1200

Occidental College has an extremely appealing leaf of an English Psalter of circa 1200, containing Psalms 20:1-21:6:

The fact that the Psalm 21 initial is enlarged (three lines in height, instead of Psalm 20's two-line height) suggests a Benedictine connection: Psalm 21 was one of the Benedictine divisions of the Psalms, being the first Psalm said at Matins on Sundays.

The leaf recognisably comes from a very handsome but somewhat defective volume of 129 leaves offered by Maggs Bros., Catalogue 1262: Illuminated Leaves and Historical Documents  (Christmas, 1998), item 7, and again in European Bulletin, no.23: Illuminated Miniatures, Manuscripts, and Single Leaves 1000-1900 A.D., Catalogue 1366 [December, 2004], item 1, with a colour reproduction:

The Maggs description reports that it was previously Christie's, 2 July 1975, lot 290, when it had "140 leaves (including one replacement leaf at the beginning)".

Of the leaves that had been removed from the volume between 1975 and 1998 were:

• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 12, no. 25
• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 13 (July 1986), nos. 32, 33
• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 15 / Catalogue 1103, no. 55
• Maggs Bros., Bulletin 22 / Catalogue 1249 [April 1998] no. 4, with reproduction. Pss.17:39-18:7
• Sotheby's, 17 June 1997, lot 20 (a)

EDIT 25 April 2014

I have just noticed that the volume was sold at Sotheby's, 23 June 1998, lot 45, with a description listing several single leaves that had been extracted since 1975.

Cuttings from a 13th-Century Royal Spanish Bible

A week ago I visited the current exhibition of manuscripts at Lille. It was mostly very unimpressive, with low-quality objects displayed in a bizarre setting. But it did have a few high-quality items, notably the two surviving full-page miniatures of the Liessies Gospels.

One other item especially caught my eye: a framed group of 13 cuttings from a Bible, owned by the Musée de Picardie, Amiens, with bright burnished gold backgrounds, and unusual interlace ornament on many of the extremities of the historiated initials:

Philip Bliss (1787-1857) and Rebekah Bliss (1749-1819)

Earlier this year a fine Flemish Book of Hours with an interesting  early 19th-century provenance was sold in London. A faint pencil inscription on a flyleaf:

Inscription, as it appears in normal light

at first appeared to read:

"Missal of considerable 

delicacy and beauty.

cost Mr. Bliss [£25 ??]"

This immediately suggested Philip Bliss, the well -known Oxford antiquarian, book-collector, and member of the Roxburghe Club. 

A newly discovered leaf written by Sanvito

Much has been written about Otto Ege in the past two decades: see, for example, the articles by Barbara Shailor, ‘Otto Ege: His Manuscript Fragment Collection and the Opportunities Presented by Electronic Technology’ (2003) (available online), and by Fred Porcheddu, ‘Otto F. Ege: Teacher, Collector, Biblioclast’ (2006) (also available online), as well as the Ege project website at Denison University.

The most recent flurry of interest in Ege has been prompted by Lisa Fagin Davis’s entertaining and informative Manuscript Road Trip blog-posts here, here, here, and here (and doubtless more will follow).

Ege had a distinctive way of ruling his mounts in red ink; this image comes from the Shailor article cited above, and is also used by Fagin Davis in one of her blog-posts:

Coincidentally, a few weeks before reading her blog-post, I was looking through a collection of leaves which were waiting to be catalogued by Christie's, London, and recognised that they are in characteristic red-ruled Ege mounts.

One of the smallest leaves (c.120×80mm) in the Christie's group contains the start of the Hours of the Cross, with a rubric and incipit in elegant capitals in alternating colours:

Alphonse Labitte (1853- )

I occasionally encounter catalogue descriptions which mention an anonymous bookplate, variously described by different cataloguers, but recognisable from its device/motto on the scroll below the shield "EXCELSIOR":

Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University, John Work Garrett Library, Gar 6
http://www.digital-scriptorium.org

Miniatures from the Loredan Hours

Four miniatures from a Book of Hours illuminated by Willem Vrelant and the Fastolf Master (now Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, ms. 575), have recently come to light. The manuscript was the main subject of James Douglas Farquhar, Creation and Imitation: The Work of a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript Illuminator, Nova University Studies in the Humanities, 1 (Fort Lauderdale, 1976). The manuscript was exhibited last year in the Flemish manuscripts exhibition in Paris.

The coats of arms below the miniatures have been erased from leaves which have been dispersed:

But most of those in the parent volume preserve the original heraldry: